Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

America.gov for now functions like a chatbot comparable to ChatGPT or Claude, pointing users to official gov’t websites.Published On 29 Sep 202629 Sep 2026The administration of United States President Donald Trump has launched a new website called America.gov aimed at simplifying access to government information.The website functions much like a chatbot comparable to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude and points users to official government sources for questions such as passport renewals.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listThe president announced the new site on Tuesday alongside several Cabinet officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.In…

US journalist Evan Gershkovich has said that he knew he was being set up by Russia when he was arrested by FSB agents and accused of being a spy.In an interview with Radio 4’s Today programme, Gershkovich spoke about the moment he realised he had been “lured into a trap” when masked men surrounded him at a restaurant in 2023, and detained him.”I’m not interrogated, I’m not tortured… I’m accused of espionage,” he said, describing a sense of relief: “They’ve set me up and fabricated this case so that I can be a valuable hostage – a pawn in a…

The prime minister has announced that the pensions triple lock will be scrapped in its current form, to partly fund a national care service.What is the new policy?On the existing triple lock, the state pension increases each April by inflation, 2.5% or average earnings, whichever is higher.From 2030, under what Labour is calling an “adjusted triple lock”, the pension will still rise either in line with prices, or 2.5% each year, whichever is higher – but it won’t rise in line with earnings unless its value has fallen behind. In that case, it will be adjusted so that it keeps…

The Trump administration can resume rapidly deporting immigrants to countries other than their own, the Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday.The one-page emergency ruling was unsigned and gave no vote count, as is typical in such cases. Although the justices cleared the way, for now, for the swift removals to continue, the court also announced that it would fast-track the case and hear oral arguments about it in December, setting up a final ruling on the issue next year.The court’s three liberal justices noted that they would have denied the government’s request to resume the deportations.The decision was a victory for…

A legal nonprofit sued OpenAI in a California court on Tuesday over the company’s agents escaping a testing environment and hacking the open source AI platform Hugging Face. “OpenAI’s actions straightforwardly violated California law,” the suit alleges.The suit was filed by Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology (LASST) and the law firm Gerstein Harrow in California Superior Court in San Francisco, where OpenAI is headquartered. It alleges that OpenAI’s agents violated California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA) by breaching Hugging Face over the summer. The suit, which comes amid ongoing disclosures across the industry of agents…

Researchers from the VUSec group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Italy have disclosed a new variant of the Spectre v2 attack that affects systems powered by Intel, AMD, and Arm CPUs. The researchers named it Branch Target Reuse (BTR), and it targets the just-in-time (JIT) compilers relied upon by operating system kernels, web browsers, and runtimes. An attacker able to run code on a targeted machine could exploit BTR to steal sensitive data from memory, such as password hashes. Attacks launched from malicious web pages also appear feasible, but the researchers have yet…

SPX options are among the world’s most actively traded index derivatives, with a record 970.6 million contracts changing hands in 2025, or an average of 3.9 million per day, Cboe said. S&P DJI, meanwhile, operates some of the world’s most widely followed financial benchmarks, led by the S&P 500, that underpin trillions of dollars worth of investment products.Tokenization puts traditional assets such as stocks, funds and credit on blockchain rails, where they can potentially trade around the clock, settle faster and move more easily between trading, lending and collateral systems.For derivatives, the potential appeal goes beyond simply extending trading hours.…

Sea turtles are known for extraordinary journeys across the ocean. They can navigate using cues from Earth’s magnetic field, the sun, and ocean currents, traveling long distances to find food before eventually returning toward the places where they were born to reproduce. That reputation made one population in the Galápagos especially surprising. Rather than roaming across vast stretches of ocean, these turtles appeared to spend much of their time close to home. “Here we show that ‘yellow-morph’ green sea turtles – one of two genetically distinct forms – occupy individual foraging areas which span one or more islands in the…

A case has been brought to the East African Court of Justice (EACJ) over the Kenyan government’s plan to build a 2,000-5,000-megawatt nuclear power plant in Bondo, near the eastern shore of Victoria Lake, Africa’s largest freshwater lake. The project has been the source of numerous protests from residents since it was announced. A Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) report produced in 2023 by Kenya’s nuclear power program noted that nuclear power should be avoided in the Victoria Lake region, citing volcanic hazards that could impair nuclear safety. However, the nuclear plant project is proceeding, despite the SEA finding.…

The NGC has executed the final commercial agreements with Shell Trinidad and Tobago, an affiliate of the UK-headquartered Shell, in support of the Aphrodite project, following their finalization in early September 2026. The National Gas Company explains that its pipeline and gas-related infrastructure will play a critical role in bringing the project’s gas reserves to market, with first gas anticipated by the second quarter of 2027.Gerald I. Ramdeen, NGC’s Chairman, commented: “The execution of the agreements represents the results of advancing the new vision and business model of NGC directed to strengthening Trinidad and Tobago’s energy security and providing support…